I’m tired of being tired. I’m exhausted and I’ve been exhausted for years.
This isn’t a tale of woes, nor is it a tale of mistakes. It is just a tale…a true one at that. It is not meant to discourage or even encourage. It is just a telling…it is our story.
So grab a cup of coffee or tea or a good ale or cider and settle in…this is going to be a long one.
For the past 11+ years Wes and I have run a successful photography business. When we started, we shot a friend’s wedding and had to borrow the groom’s camera. And of course, we did it for free, because we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. I had nightmares for weeks before the wedding (literal nightmares! I had some terrible dreams leading up to the day!). I mean, this was our ONLY chance. If we screwed up the wedding photos we didn’t get a do-over. We had NO clue about running a photography business. We had no clue about shooting someone’s wedding! The day of the wedding came, and we shot it, and the biggest surprise was that the photos actually turned out pretty great. All of a sudden I wasn’t feeling so inept. And after a lot of coaxing from an extremely supportive husband, I decided that I might just try this wedding photographer thing out. I was naive, and I was ignorant in a lot of ways, but I had a “can-do” attitude, so I went for it. I started a business called Nina Mullins Photography. I charged about $700 for our second wedding (and I was SO nervous about it!), and about the same for our third wedding. I quickly realized that I would never survive on this income with the amount of work I had to do. The hours of editing and shooting and researching were endless! The prices quickly went up.
Our business began to grow. The U.S. Bureau of Labor says that only 50% of small businesses make it to year 5. It took us about three to make a profit. We were ahead of the game and still growing. We were actually making money doing something I really enjoyed! And after 4 years I quit my full time job as a patient registrar at a local hospital and started doing our photography business full time. And about 4 years after that, Wes left his full time job and joined me. We became Nina & Wes Photography and life was exciting! We were traveling all over the world. We shot weddings in Sweden, Norway, Mexico, and Canada. We were flying all over the country shooting weddings and commercial shoots. We attended some amazing workshops, and then in 2015 we hosted our first workshop, a non-profit workshop in Nepal. It was amazing!
I would wear my busy days as badges of honor. On social media I would talk about how many shoots I had scheduled and how many weddings I had booked. I would share about my typical work day which usually looked like hours upon hours of time spent editing at my desk at home. I would say I was insanely busy, but in the same breath say how thankful I was to be doing the job I was doing. You could see me say things like, “I can’t believe this is my job!” or “How is this my life?!” (insert photo of dramatic, snowy landscapes from Banff National Park). I mean, I got to shoot a wedding north of the Artic Circle on Lofoten, Norway! Have you SEEN that place?! It’s insanely beautiful! I’m NOT exaggerating! Just look up Reinebringen…you’ll see what I’m talking about. Nevermind…I’ll just post photos of it. You’ll understand now. This was my dream come true! Several years ago I said I wanted to shoot a wedding here. And then one day I got an email from a couple asking if we could shoot their wedding in…yeah…you guessed it…Lofoten. I was blown away.
Now don’t misunderstand me…I wasn’t lying when I said all those positive things about my job. I wasn’t making it seem like I was happier than I actually was. I was legitimately thankful for the job I had, and it was exciting! I have met so many amazing people over the years because of our wedding photography business. We have had conversations that went deep and wide with people all over the globe. Truly amazing!
But in all of that time, I was growing weary. And anxiety was building. There is a certain amount of “upkeep” you have to maintain in order to remain profitable. You have to maintain relationships with other wedding vendors, and at the same time keep reaching out to new ones. I’m an extrovert and even so that upkeep can be exhausting at times. I can’t imagine how debilitating that can be for my introverted photographer friends! You have to constantly strive to refrain from comparing your success with the success of others. You have to constantly reevaluate what your definition of success is? Is it how much money you make? How many people you know? How many weddings you book? How many followers you have on Instagram? How much you enjoy your job? You have to decide and then you have to keep pushing forward.
Hosting our workshop in Nepal was probably the height of our photographic career for me. This workshop went beyond weddings and making money and it focused on loving on others and giving back to the world with what you have been given. It was my heart!
And as I pursued my heart more, I began to realize that I was holding on to our photography business tightly. I didn’t want to let go. Not only did I love my job, but I was afraid that if I let go God might actually take it away from me. And if He took it away from me, what else could I do? I had spent the last 10 years cultivating relationships, our brand, and the heart of our business. I had done nothing else, and now I didn’t know what else I was capable of doing outside of photography. But I knew I had to let go. I needed to let God have our business. I had given it to Him partially, but never had I told Him that He could take it all. And about 2 years ago I did just that. I remember it clearly…Wes was in the office with me and we both were on the floor before God. I got down on my knees and simply prayed, “God, I surrender this business to you. Take it or leave it, but it’s yours.” I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I didn’t know if God would bring our business to a close, or if He would continue to grow it. But that wasn’t important anymore. At that moment, I simply wanted God to know that I wanted Him to have everything so that He could do anything that He wanted in my business and life.
The days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months. Nothing big happened, and no life-altering changes occurred…until September of 2016.
Originally we had been asked to photograph a workshop in Cornwall, England at that time. We were so excited to once again be traveling across the world for work! And to Cornwall of all places! Well, sometimes the world of weddings and photography and workshops can be a bit fickle. And as fate would have it, the workshop got cancelled. But oddly enough, neither one of us were very disappointed. We decided to make a vacation of it. We would go to England and we would make an adventure of it instead! But here’s the kicker. I made a decision not to work on this trip.
Sounds simple right? But here’s the thing. We wedding photographers…We have a bit of a tick of sorts. We have this itch that can’t seem to be scratched. It can be a bit of a nasty habit if we aren’t careful. You see, we tend to make every trip we make into a work trip. We say to ourselves, “We are going to New Zealand (or Scotland, or Iceland, or Argentina, or Kenya….name your poison)! Let’s schedule a styled shoot!” or “Let’s find some couples that are engaged and photograph them while we are there on vacation!” Or “Let’s reach out to all the venues in France and let them know we will be there during this week of vacation and see if they’ll refer us to some of their wedding clients!” Yeah…I’ve said and done ALL of those things. And instead of ever getting rest, every vacation turns into checking emails every few hours (or less!), sending out quotes for weddings, collaborating with vendors for a styled shoot, getting ready for a paid gig that we took on simply because we wanted to help pay for our trip, and of course, editing in between all those things. I tend to trick myself into thinking that because I’m so lucky to be in Norway for 6 weeks, I’m actually on vacation. I mean, I may have three weddings, a workshop, constant editing to do, and never-ending emails, but I’m in NORWAY! How can I complain? Do you know how many people would give their right arm to be able to travel like I do?! And yet…I’m tired. So so tired. Of course I take days off on those trips. I take a day to hike through the mountains and I enjoy every moment and soak in every view and pet every sheep along the way that will let me. I looooove those days! But inevitably I am always thinking about how much work I have to do the next day. And when I get home after that long and beautiful hike, I will be on those emails again, and I’ll be sending quotes, and curating our social media pages.
So when I say I decided to not work when we went to England, it was a BIG deal. I asked my BFF to take my emails, and let clients know that I would be back in 10 days. I committed to no email, no shoots, no work…nada.
When we arrived in Oxford on September 20, 2016 something magical happened. It is hard to describe, but there was a shift that occurred. I should also mention that for the past year I had been reading books upon books upon books. These were books that were causing me to dream. They were building my faith. They were causing me to question my faith. And they were challenging me and inspiring me. I was also reading loads of C.S. Lewis.
As we went from our Airbnb to a local restaurant, we were walking along a public footpath (very common here in the UK) and my heart was swelling. If you ask me, I think I was practically floating along the footpath, barely touching the ground. I literally turned and looked at Wes in the most cheesy, unfiltered, little-girl delight voice, and said, “I’M SO HAPPY!!!” And I was! I felt overcome by Joy and it was pure and unadulterated and I could not think of the last time I felt so free and happy. After lunch we made our way to Magdalen College (a college at Oxford University which also happens to be where C.S. Lewis was a Tutorial Fellow and spent many evenings walking along Addison’s Walk with his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson). As we walked along the path of Addison’s Walk, a sentence came to my mind…it was like a whisper in my spirit…”Walk with Me in expectation.” I turned to Wes and immediately told him what I was hearing. “I feel like God just said, ‘Walk with me in expectation’. I feel like He is saying that we should move forward, expecting Him to move, but that we shouldn’t set up our own expectations.” It was an exciting moment. And my heart was soaring because not only did I hear God speaking (in the same place where Tolkien, Dyson, and C.S. Lewis felt a great wind rush through on a still night in Oxford), but He was calling us to go deeper with Him, and it seemed like He was saying He had some exciting things in store for us. We just had to trust Him.
We spent 9 full days in England. Part of that time was in Oxford, exploring all things C.S. Lewis (including several great conversations with Walter Hooper, Lewis’s secretary at the end of his life), and then a couple of days in Cornwall, soaking in the winds from the cliffs of the rocky shores of Port Quin and sneaking up on rabbits that had built their homes close to our spot by the water. We sat on the cliffs by Tintagel Castle and and bowed before a sculpture of King Arthur. Wes and I read together and journaled. We explored and took in every moment like two small children experiencing joy for the first time. We were wide-eyed and expectant…innocent and excited. And as the days passed, I came to a shocking realization. This was the first time in 10 years that I hadn’t worked. I mean…I had taken breaks. I had taken days off here and there. But in reality, I was always working. Always emailing. Always quoting. Always shooting. Always editing. It was always something. And for the first time, all that stopped…and I breathed. And I laughed. And I played. And I lived.
I came home from that trip changed. Something had shifted within me and it wasn’t temporary. I no longer had the drive to keep pushing our photography business forward. I loved our clients and loved the work, but the desire to keep growing and hustling was no longer there. I felt surprised by this new feeling. And I didn’t know what to do with it. On that day several months prior, when I was lying on the floor offering God our business, I had no idea what that would look like. I thought perhaps He would present something new in place of our business. But instead He created space in my heart to dream. In turn, I created space in my life to rest. In England, a place I never had much excitement for no matter how many times I had visited, as the commotion of the last 10 years came to a hault, those spaces began to be filled with new dreams…dreams I didn’t even know I had. One day, on that very special trip to England, as Wes and I were walking down a busy street in Oxford, I turned around and looked Wes in the eyes and said, “I could live here!” He looked at me with surprise and said, “I literally just had that same thought 10 seconds ago!” This was a pivotal moment. Not only were our hearts and minds in sync, but there was a stirring happening. And to make this moment even more special, I should explain that Wes has never wanted to live anywhere other than Kentucky. As much as he has traveled (because he’s kind enough to indulge me in all my travel adventures!), he always prefers our little piece of heaven in Kentucky. He often says that he could be perfectly happy staying on that land forever. So when he said he could move to Oxford, we knew something special had happened.
10 years into our photography business and I realized that I had been exhausted and stressed for nearly the same amount of time. I didn’t want to feel that way anymore. My heart needed change. My heart needed freedom.
After England, we continued walking in that expectation that God called us to. Wes applied to a yearlong program at Oxford University and OCCA (Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics), and in April of 2017 he was accepted. We couldn’t believe it! We were going to Oxford for the next school year! We continued to shoot weddings as usual, but our hearts were moving in a new direction. The future was unclear, but we trusted that God had something really special in store for us. We had been asking God what else I might do aside from photography. I was clueless. There were days I cried because I felt like there was nothing for me. But then in that same month, a friend of mind suggested I look into the business side of Young Living. I had been using Young Living essential oils for about a year or so and I LOVED them, but I swore I would never sell because I’d been down the MLM road before, and it had never gone well (either because the company was shady, or the product was good but the company was too pushy, or the product wasn’t actually very good but promised a lot). But this time it felt different. No one had ever pushed me to sell any Young Living products. I had seen how incredibly effective the oils had been in our lives, and especially getting rid of toxins in our home. And when I mentioned doing the business side of YL to Wes he said, “Nina, there’s something to this. I think this might be a God moment.”
And that’s where our new journey started. I gave my first educational class in July of 2017, and I’ve been working hard at it ever since. The income is small now, but I already know where that is headed and I’m excited, because my dreams involve financially taking care of our big family in Nepal, taking care of my parents in Kentucky, paying off our debts, and giving back as much as possible. And maybe…just maybe…some lives might be changed simply by making better choices for our health. And Young Living is an awesome company with integrity and kindness and people who care about each other. Feeling very thankful to have kind of stumbled into something so special! And it doesn’t leave me exhausted. It doesn’t leave me anxious. It leaves me feeling settled and at peace, and happy to know I can be a part of helping others find wellness, and even financial freedom.
In September of 2017 Wes moved over to Oxford to start school. It was a shock to my faith, because I really believed that I would be going over with him (along with our two little ones). That word that God had given me the year before about not setting up my own expectations came to mind. I expected God to take us to England all at once. But God had something different in mind. In all honesty, it was a blow to my faith, because I truly felt God was going to provide a job and means to live in Oxford comfortably without any struggle. *insert haughty laugh here* Instead, He allowed Wes to come ahead of us, and for us to spend three months apart. During that time God did some miraculous things in Wes’s heart. After crying for the first week or two of his absence (geez I am such a wuss!), I got into a groove and began to manage life without Wes at home with us every day. It wasn’t ideal, but it was definitely doable. In the meantime I worked hard at our Young Living business, worked hard at getting ourselves healthier, and worked hard at helping others do the same. When we joined Wes in the end of December, I knew things were changing in our marriage…for the better. Our time apart created yet another space for us to grow closer, as strange as that sounds. This seemed to be the theme of our lives at this moment…creating spaces. As we began to let go of all the things we were holding onto so tightly, we were making room for God to grow in us the dreams that were buried deep within us, some that we didn’t even know we had because our hustle and grind to grow our photography business was shoving them down deep to hidden places. Dreams were coming to life again. It was beautiful.
And here we are. It is February of 2018. We are living in a house in a quiet neighbourhood in Oxford. The prayers we prayed two years ago are being answered with each passing month. Wes has applied for his masters at Oxford, but the wait is 8-10 weeks to find out if he will be accepted, so we are called to patience again. The kids are being homeschooled because we don’t have a visa that allows them to attend school here, so the kids and I spend a LOT of time together. Wes and I don’t get nearly as much time together as we used to when we were just two business owners living the travel life with kids. School this year is taking up much of his time, and yet our marriage is stronger than it has ever been. I spend a couple hours a day working on our Young Living business. Several days a week we explore new places in Oxford, and we spend many hours walking and playing in parks. We meet new people in coffee shops and computer stores, and I even joined a women’s bible study at Wes’s school which is something I never thought I’d do again (and I love it!). I still can’t believe we get to live in such a beautiful place! I will never tire of those dreaming spires!
We still have so many unanswered questions and there are times when everything is uncertain. I am constantly being pulled into faith…pulled into trusting a Father who doesn’t break His promises. My friend Angela gave me a compass before I left and on the back it says, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” That beautiful quote is from Corrie ten Boom, one of my heroes. I know who my God is. I need to continue to believe He is who He says He is (sometimes I doubt!), and continue to trust that this wild adventure we are on is all for something.
I don’t tell this tale to berate the wedding photography world, or to undermine the love that so many have for this wonderful career. This job has taken us around the world and back again. It has allowed us to see places we may never have seen otherwise. It has made us better business owners, and more fruitful givers. It has prepared us for this next chapter in our story! And for that I am so thankful. But I am ready for change. I am ready to not be so tired all the time (I’m already feeling so much better!). I know there are photographers out there that have found balance, but in all honesty, most of my photographer friends deal with the same issues. We are working our asses off, we are stressed out, and we are exhausted.
Are we shutting down our photography business? No. At least, not yet. But if God asks us to, we will. Because with every step of obedience we have taken, He has given us so much more in return. Because we know that it doesn’t matter how big our names are in this industry…if God’s not in it, it’s all for naught. We desperately want to chase after the dreams He has given us. We want the faith to trust Him to bring those dreams to fruition. And we don’t want to be hindered by our own exhaustion. Yes, working hard can always be exhausting, but if you’re not working hard at what you’re meant for, you’ll never be fully alive.
I am slowly beginning to feel alive again. It feels like Spring is coming and I am beginning to breathe for the first time in a long time. What seemed dormant or dead in my dream basket, is coming to life again. My mind isn’t filled up with anxious thoughts about whether or not our clients are happy or if I did a good enough job. My identity isn’t found in whether or not a bride loved the photos that I created for her (because believe me…sometimes we artists get our identities wrapped up in our work!). I am slowly, but steadily, finding my way to who I was created to be. It’s taken me a while, but I think I am getting there.
I hope you will stick around and see what happens on this crazy adventure. And perhaps you’ll even go after your own dreams, even if it’s a little (or a lot) scary. I promise you, if you are meant for it, it will be worth it. And when you do go after those dreams, we hope you will tell us all about it.
